


Tick

by alchimie



Category: Unus Annus - Fandom, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, CrankGameplays - Freeform, Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Markiplier - Freeform, Momento Mori, Unus Annus, YouTubers - Freeform, big big angst, crankiplier - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:42:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27361438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchimie/pseuds/alchimie
Summary: Images flash in my head again. A car pulling out of the driveway and disappearing into the night. A hand grasping mine tightly and then pulling away suddenly. A clock ticking. A faucet running. A coffin. A black coffin. No, it was white.  Was it?Frustrated, I smack my head with my hand, as if I could stop the wandering thoughts from brute force alone. I need to focus. Someone else is here with me. Someone else stayed back in the house. I waited for them. I waited for them and they didn’t come back. I waited for them and they didn’t come back and I went searching for them.I hear a scream far below me.Ethan.
Relationships: Mark Fischbach/Ethan Nestor
Comments: 8
Kudos: 98





	Tick

I come to, slowly, hearing the sound of the clock echoing in the distance. 

My eyes open to a thick darkness, and it takes me a few moments before my eyes adjust somewhat. It remains too dark to see much, but I can start to make out the basic shapes of the objects around me. I reach my hands down underneath where I sit and feel the creaking wood floors underneath me. The texture feels foreign to me, but somehow deep down I have the sense that I know exactly where I am. Focusing harder, I can make out a few flashes of memory in the back of my head. An abandoned house at night. Shadows dancing around me. A coffin. Whispers from another room. A hand reaching out for me. 

My attention returns to where I sit, my eyes darting around to try to make out more of the room around me. I slowly come to a stand, grasping for anything to hold on to. My fingers make contact with a hard surface. It’s covered in what must be a thick layer of dust that clings to my fingers, but underneath it feels relatively smooth and bitingly cold. I notice how cold I feel for the first time. Each breath in feels like ice entering my lungs, and I notice that I’m shivering. It wasn’t this cold before.

Like a deer walking for the first time, I take a few cautiously awkward steps forward, clinging to the cold surface for dear life. I only make it two or three feet before I feel a presence behind me, an eerily warm breath touching the back of my neck and making every cell in my body stand on edge.

_ It’s time. _

Instinctively, I turn around and swing a frantic fist into the darkness, but my blow does not make contact with the mysterious force. Instead, I fall into the movement and tumble back down onto the hardwood with a thud, landing directly on my shoulder. A hot pain fills my arm from the impact, contrasting the frigid air around me. I swear that I hear a laugh in the distance as I curse under my breath, but when I try to listen in to find out where it came from all I can hear is the ticking of the clock getting louder ever so gently. My eyes now can make out finer details in the dark. On four sides, I am surrounded by walls that have been stripped bare, the outer shell removed only to show the wooden support beams and insulation. The ceilings go up at least twenty feet high, pointing upward towards a skylight window in the shape of a diamond. I squint to try to make out the sky, trying to search for stars or the moon but all I see is the twilight navy. Lord knows what time it is.

I need to get out of here - wherever here is. Choking down the pain of my fall, I use my good arm to grab onto the counter once more to hoist myself back on my feet. Now that I can see more of what’s around me, it is easier to navigate through the darkness. It’s hard to tell what this room used to be before the house began to decay, but it seems like its job in the afterlife is just storage, a holding cell of what appears to be broken down and forgotten antiques and furniture. I try my best to maneuver silently to what was once a doorway (the door long being torn off from the frame), but my environment gives away my presence with the whining creaks of the floorboard underneath me. I pray to whatever gods may or may not be that the floor itself does not cave in and send me falling. Just as I cross through the would-be threshold, I become careless and step without looking only to smash down onto a piece of glass. While my shoe is just thick enough to protect me from however many shards would have penetrated the tender flesh, the sound of the glass crumbling echoes through the hall like the screech of a dying animal. In the darkness, I feel eyes on me. The clock ticks louder. 

_ There’s nowhere for you to go. _

The voice is further away now and hard to place. I circle around, scanning for a figure in the shadows but finding nothing again and again. The voice - it sounds so familiar. Far too familiar. 

I was here with others. I think harder and harder, trying desperately to dig up details as I sneak into the first room I see in the hallway. While my position has been given away, it still feels safer not being in the open air, so to speak. I had come here with others, yes. The night before starts to come back to me. Was it even the night before? I feel as if I had been unconscious for days if not months. How long have I been in this house? I struggle to shake away that train of thought as I concentrate. We were here filming. Evan, Amy, and I, and someone else. Someone else. The clock ticks louder. Someone else was with us. I remember seeing Evan and Amy head out, but we stayed back. Why did we stay back? Images flash in my head again. A car pulling out of the driveway and disappearing into the night. A hand grasping mine tightly and then pulling away suddenly. A clock ticking. A faucet running. A coffin. A black coffin. No, it was white. Was it? 

Frustrated, I smack my head with my hand, as if I could stop the wandering thoughts from brute force alone. I need to focus. Someone else is here with me. Someone else stayed back in the house. I waited for them. I waited for them and they didn’t come back. I waited for them and they didn’t come back and I went searching for them.

I hear a scream far below me. 

Ethan.

_ You’re wasting your time, your precious time.  _

It all comes rushing back. All pretense of trying to remain unheard and unseen get thrown out as I desperately start to rush in the direction of the sound. 

“No, no, this can’t be it. There must be more time,” I insist to the voice in the darkness, bargaining as I try to find the staircase. The house feels like a nonsensical maze, each corner I turn into leading me to a dead end. 

_ One year. That was the deal.  _

I shake my head, tears threatening at my eyes as I hear another scream in the distance. I need to find him. I need to get us out of this mess. I get trapped in another dead end, a long room with a painting of a man in a black suit fallen onto the ground. Anger fills my stomach and overflows into my chest. 

_ You can run all you want, but you can’t escape. So many have tried.  _

My fists shake. I grab the first thing I see - a lamp with a pitiful lean resting on what was probably once a bedside table - and chuck it into the shadowy void. To my surprise, the ceramic base makes purchase with a perfectly intact door before shattering on the ground in front of it. I could swear on my own life that this door had not been there seconds ago.

The clock ticks louder. I hear one last scream before the voice below goes silent. I swear I heard him scream my name. 

We had a year. The year was not enough. We needed so much more, so much more time. If we could only have another year, more time together, more time to exist and create and be, more time. On the other side of the door where I smashed the lamp, I find a narrow staircase that fades into total black. I have no choice. I start to plunge into the blackness, losing what little vision I had prior in hopes that my path would lead me to him. I have no other options. I grip onto what is left of the railing desperately, my knuckles turning white. I descend for what feels like hours before I finally reach what appears to be solid ground. Through another door way, I see a flicker of hope of moonlight streaming into another room. 

As I pass through this last threshold, that is when I see him. Huddled in a pathetic heap on the ground, clutching on to himself. He looks so small from afar, a trembling little black shadow. Through the dark, I can still see his glowing eyes look up at me. I forgot the pain, the cold, the panic, for just one moment.

“M-Mark?”

I collapse onto my knees beside him, clutching the man for dear life. His skin is freezing and he is shivering madly, but I cannot for the life of me let go.

“Do you hear them? Do you hear them, too?” he asks in a broken whisper. His hand reaches up to clutch my shoulder, the fingers digging in hard enough to bruise my already wounded arm, but in the moment it almost feels good to be reminded that for this moment I am still alive. 

I nod slowly. 

As I cling onto him, my own concerns for myself disappear. Time is almost up for me. It was a year, that was the agreement, that was the deal. I have lived a life I could be proud of, at least for the most part. But it was too soon for him. Shivering in my arms and looking so little, I am reminded of just how young Ethan still is. A man just at the beginning of making something wonderful of himself, a man with so much beautiful potential and beautiful energy to give to the world. Maybe I deserve what is coming to me, but Ethan does not. 

My heart aches with a deep regret. I don’t want more time, but I want more time with him. I just want to be able to tell him everything he means to me. I want to tell him how proud I am of him. I want to have something more than a panicked rush to fit in so much in so little time. How could one year with him ever be enough? 

The clock ticks louder. 

_ You’re out of time.  _

No, no, no. No. I squeeze Ethan tighter, desperate to hold on to this moment. I can feel something pulling inside of me, trying to pull me back down under to the darkness from before. I need more time. Just a little longer.

I see Ethan’s eyes start to droop.

“No, no, Ethan, look at me,” I beg softly, tapping him frantically on the cheek. “It’s not time yet. Please, look at me. I’m still here. You’re still here.”

Ethan shook his head, though I could still see him pushing to keep his eyes open and his focus on me. “It’s too late, Mark. We’re too late.” His iron grip on my shoulder starts to loosen as he loses focus again.

The clock ticks louder.

Could this really be the end? Was this all for nothing? What’s the point in any of this if everything just comes to an end? 

What is going to happen to us when the time runs out?

_ Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.  _

Ethan feels colder in my arms. His eyes almost look black.

_ I told you to remember.  _

“Ethan.” I try to shake him back awake. He lets out a small groan, but his eyes remain unfocused. “Ethan, we don’t have much left. I need - I need to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry,” he says so softly, I almost don’t hear it.

I shake my head, letting out a forced laugh. “S-sorry? What are you sorry about? No, Ethan, I need you to listen to me.” My ears ache with the sound of the ticking getting louder and louder. “Ethan, please, just look at me one more time.” I grasp onto his face with both of my hands, trying to look directly in his eyes as much as possible. He’s barely there, but it’s just enough. It has to be enough. “Ethan, I lov--”

The clock stops ticking.

Before I can say anything else, everything turns white. 

**Author's Note:**

> First time writing in a loooong while, but I have been on a Crankiplier kick. Got this idea in my head after watching the Truth of Unus Annus video. Hope you all like it!


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